


replaced the fine mind behind your face

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, Memory Alteration, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8887588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: The first time she heard Canderous speak Mando'a on the Hawk, she turned around and just about put her utility knife through his throat.It was a totally unconscious reaction, completely irrational, and she was sorry the millisecond the knife left her hand. She had some luck; the knife had horrible fucking balance and she wasn't the type to practice with throwing knives anyway when a good blaster would do. As a result, it thudded into the wall of the main hold about six inches from his face, leaving the room frozen.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelan/gifts).



> I hope my recipient enjoys the fic! 
> 
> Title from the lyrics of "On a Slow Night" by Metric.
> 
> EDIT: Now that the anon period is over, I'd like to note that this takes place in a different continuity from my other KOTOR fic.

 

The first time she heard Canderous speak Mando'a on the Hawk, she turned around and just about put her utility knife through his throat.

It was a totally unconscious reaction, completely irrational, and she was sorry the millisecond the knife left her hand. She had some luck; the knife had horrible fucking balance and she wasn't the type to practice with throwing knives anyway when a good blaster would do. As a result, it thudded into the wall of the main hold about six inches from his face, leaving the room frozen.

“--fucking hells, so sorry,” she said, becoming aware she was babbling.

“Fuck,” Canderous said, but it was an appreciative sort of curse. He pulled it out of the wall. “Didn't think a blade like that would go into durasteel. Two inches deep, look.”

She understood by this that she was forgiven, if indeed Canderous was the type to consider holding a grudge about people throwing knives at his head for no reason in the first place. She heaved a sigh of relief, and went to look.

Canderous was right. It was impressive. Furthermore, Mission turned out to know how to patch durasteel, so that was alright.

Bastila cornered her later, of course, and she had to go through the humiliatingly awkward affair of explaining that she hadn't meant to do it, it was just instinct. PTSD was like that sometimes. She hadn't heard Mando'a since the Mandalorian Wars, and for a tiny fraction of a second she'd been back on some nameless Rim world, fighting for her life and to smear the guy who had her and her squad pinned into bloody guts.

(Well. She hadn't said that last part. It seemed likely that Bastila, being a Jedi, would disapprove. She had only a vague idea of what Jedi were like, never having served with one and coming from the sort of backwater world they were not often sent to; Bastila seemed, to her, like a nun or something. Someone who you tried not to curse in front of, or mention sex.

Later, it occurred to her that if she had maybe been less on her best behavior in front of Bastila, the Council might not have had that insane idea about making her _one_ of them, and she regretted it, slightly.)

But at the time she hadn't been aware of any of that, just concerned with the fact that she'd had a flashback and tried to kill someone who was an ally, never mind that she knew perfectly well why.

Possibly more troubling was the fact that she had no idea which battle she'd been in to hear Mando'a. She was a Fleet soldier, wasn't she? Her records said so, anyway. That wasn't the sort of thing you should be uncertain about, though, and so she refused to check the records of where she'd fought in the Mandalorian Wars and make real the fact that she didn't know. There was some explanation; just as soon as she came up with one she would feel better about it.

In truth, in those days before she got to Dantooine and had a whole new set of urgent problems to distract her, she had been pretty sure she was losing her mind.

There was the Mando'a thing, yeah, and that was troubling. But it was all the other shit that stacked up to spell crazy. Like the fact that she couldn't remember where she learned the Tarisian dialect of Twi'lekese (literary standard of that particular sector of space, far, far away from the Twi'lek homeworld); she remembered classes, but she'd looked up the program out of hopes of establishing a timeline out of the mess of her head and discovered that school only taught the Ryloth dialect, which was, after all, the galactic standard.

After discovering that, she had decided not to look up any more of the language classes. Or anything about language at all.

But that hadn't been enough, because things like that kept happening. On the way to Dantooine, she and Mission were working on a repair for T3, who had had a fuse short out, and she was explaining some detail of the wiring to Mission, when the girl asked, naturally, where she had learned mechanics.

She had reached, not without fear, into the blank blackness in the back of her mind where those memories not useful to day to day life dwelt, and come up with nothing. Not a class, or a vague sense of who had taught her, or a half plausible story. The only thing she found was a sense memory of thick gloves and a smell of hot vegetation she had to assume was the scent of Deralia.

“Just, you know, messing around as a kid,” she said, and hoped she was right.

There was also the eerie familiarity of Dantooine. The memory of thick, hot vegetation came back to her overwhelmingly as she stepped off the ship; Dantooine smelled just like it, and like more. Like thunderstorms that swept the earth for miles, like lakes clear enough to see through, like the hot ozone smell of a lightsaber sweeping the air an inch from your face. It all could have been her imagination, but--

But when they issued her Jedi robes with her apprenticeship, she buried her face in them and inhaled, and smelled _home_ with the handwoven cotton and undyed silk, and burst into tears.

So there were a few dozen moments like that in the span of a few weeks, but all drops in the bucket compared to the fact that half the time she didn't remember her name. It slipped away from her like water, or like the dates of a long ago war you were supposed to be reproducing for your secondary school's history class.

It took her a surprisingly long time to notice, but then, she supposed most people didn't address themselves by their name in their own minds, and back on the Endar Spire people remembered it for her, half a dozen times a day it was Ensign – oh, blast it, she'd forgotten again. Ensign something, anyway. And Carth, fortunately, was the paranoid type who probably had the files on the Endar Spire's janitorial staff – may they rest peacefully – memorized, so she had hung back and let him handle the introductions on Taris and it didn't seem to matter too much.

But the fact that it wasn't as big of a practical problem as she thought it probably should be did not change the fact that it was _absolutely fucking bizarre,_ and she was going crazy, or maybe it was the head injury but that wouldn't explain the problems she'd had before Taris.

All of which might be why she managed to totally forget about her attempt to skewer Canderous within a week, well before they arrived on Dantooine. She didn't particularly notice him avoiding her, either; she figured he was the antisocial type, and holing up in the cargo bay was just his style.

And so it took her totally by surprise when Canderous came to talk to her. At the time, she was working hard at not thinking about how natural a lightsaber felt in her hands – so natural that the thing she was best at in thirty-four years of life was apparently trying to cut Bastila Shan in half during training bouts. Theoretically, she was distracting herself with the latest of many reading assignments on the Jedi Order's tenets and philosophy, although in the tradition of students everywhere, she had taken advantage of the weather that day to go outside and find herself coincidentally unable to focus on reading.

“Hey,” she said, poking unhappily at the datapad displaying the history of the Jedi Order she was supposed to be reading. “Problem on the ship?” She tried not to sound too hopeful. She suspected that was unbecoming of a Jedi, much like virtually everything else Vrook or Bastila had seen her do.

At least when she'd actually been a secondary school student she'd been allowed to be visibly unhappy.

“Came to talk to you,” Canderous said. “Walk?”

He eyed the Jedi around them suspiciously; she attempted not to display her glee at the uncomfortable way they eyed him back.

Maybe she could pay Canderous to follow her around and be unhappy for her.

“I can't,” she said. “Not allowed out of the enclave, or I'd have been back to the ship by now.”

“Damn,” Canderous said. “They let you have any privacy?”

“I have quarters, but they're probably bugged.” She shrugged. She was immensely grateful for the fact that being an apprentice twenty years older than the next oldest meant she didn't have to sleep in a dormitory, but she was realistic about the Jedi Council's suspicion of, apparently, anything that moved.

Canderous considered this for a second. “Any of these courtyards have a fountain?”

“Yeah, a few,” she said, a little mystified by his sudden interest in landscaping, but she got up. Any excuse to stop reading was a good one at the moment. “I'll show you.”

It took an embarrassingly long time to connect, not until they were sitting on the edge of the fountain in the center of the largest courtyard, and she was eyeing the fish and thinking about how noisy the spray was. Of course – it would be impossible to bug the spot next to the fountain, or eavesdrop; the white noise would drown out their voices more than few inches away.

She knew Canderous was brutally efficient at fighting, of course, but she somehow hadn't thought of him as a tactician, or someone who appreciated subtlety. Her estimation of him rose a few notches.

She became aware that Canderous was waiting on her, and looked up. “So,” she said, keeping her voice steady.

“So,” he said. “Looks like we're grounded for the near future. Any idea when the Jedi Council's gonna be done with you?”

She shrugged. “I still don't know what the hell they want with me in the first place. We're supposed to go investigate some ruins Bastila had a vision about – I guess both of us did – but they want me to be 'trained' first.”

Canderous nodded. “You know, there's another spaceport on Dantooine. Not a ton of commercial traffic, but I was thinking...”

“So you want to leave,” she said, surprised by how exhausted it made her.

Carth and Bastila had to stick around, since they were under orders the same as she was. Mission and Zalbaar didn't have anywhere to go or the credits to get there, and neither did T3. But Canderous could come and go as he pleased, she guessed. It wouldn't be hard for a mercenary of his caliber to find a new job, particularly since the bombardment of Taris probably meant the news of him betraying Davik hadn't spread.

Something crossed his face – reluctance, she guessed, although it was too small an expression for her to have known it. The Force, maybe. “Figured you might not want me around, now that I'm not your only shot out of Taris.”

“Not want you?” she repeated, blankly.

“That thing on the _Hawk,_ ” he said, but not judgmentally, and it suddenly connected.

Oh, fucking hells. He'd spent the entire time on the ship thinking she was some traumatized veteran pissed off about his existence--

“It's not like that,” she said, face burning inexplicably. (Carth _was_ that, down to the last paranoid drop, and she didn't think _he_ was weak or to blame for it, so why was she suddenly, hideously ashamed of herself?) “It was just – reflex, you know.”

“Reflex.” He laughed shortly. “Yeah, that I know. Thought you were Fleet, not infantry?”

It might have been the innocuousness of the settings – say what you wanted about the Jedi, their landscaping was pretty fucking amazing – or sheer isolation; she hadn't spoken to a friendly face besides Bastila in weeks, and Bastila seemed like she was about to snap with stress, so she hadn't wanted to bother her.

“Yeah, so did I,” she said, gloomily.

Canderous blinked, and made an inquisitive grunting noise, and she found herself spilling it all out. It seemed to have been waiting for weeks to jump on the first moment of weakness; she had meant to admit to perhaps some shakiness of memory, attribute it to the head injury, but instead she was telling him about the language program and Twi'lekese, and her dubious military history (she was a translator, why did she even _have_ the combat training she'd used on Taris?) and the strange feeling that she had done everything on Dantooine before, in another life.

“--and I don't even know my own name half the time, it can't be that hard to remember, it's two words, just-- fuck, I forgot _again_ ,” she said at the end of it, scrubbing her face.

A single eyebrow raised, but rather than calling her crazy, or storming off in disgust, which was probably what she would have expected if she had ever expected this situation to arise in the first place, Canderous said, “Orisi. You said, or Republic did, anyway, when we met in the cantina. Talin Orisi.”

“Right,” she said, hoping she would remember for more than a few minutes again. “And I should know that. Obviously. I mean, it's my _name_.”

“Yeah, that's fucking weird,” Canderous said, and frowned into the distance.

Somehow, she didn't think he was contemplating the arrangement of flowering vines climbing the courtyard wall.

Fifteen feet, she found herself thinking. Not easy to get over, but not impossible, either, and she'd bet a lot there was rope somewhere in this enclave...

“I've seen this before,” Canderous said, and the world seemed to stop short.

“ _What_?” she said.

“Back in the wars.” Canderous drummed his fingers on the edge of the fountain. “Not too many times, you understand, but I was... in a decent command within Ordo, and unusual problems got brought to me occasionally.”

“Like soldiers snapping and losing their minds?”

“Like Force users snapping their minds for them, to replace what's already there,” Canderous said, and for the second time in a few minutes, the world halted.

She should have denied it, should have instantly rejected the possibility. She should have known who she was beyond a doubt, been certain of the authenticity if not the stability of her mind.

She should have known her name.

But instead, there was a feeling like finding the last piece of a puzzle, like remembering a vital word and putting the meaning of a sentence together, like understanding the enemy's strategy at last...

(She was a translator. She didn't command battles.)

“You mean someone did this to me. A Jedi?” she said, and knew beyond a doubt that it was true.

It would explain a lot. It might just explain everything. Bastila's concern, the Jedi's special request for her presence that had so alarmed Carth, the Council requiring her to stay...

“Bastila did this,” she said, hearing herself speak from a distance. She seemed to be far away, maybe beyond the courtyard wall entirely, as she spoke to Canderous. “Or she's involved, or she knows what's going on. That's why she's so...”

“Guilty as a bad guard dog?” Canderous said. “I'd noticed. Figured it was just the Jedi bullshit, but maybe not. She does seem more wound up around you than usual.” He shrugged. “Can't guarantee it was a Jedi, but they do seem to be involved somehow. Whoever did it to you didn't do a great job, or the patch would be sticking better.”

“So I've been mindwiped by an incompetent mysterious force,” she said, and put her face in her hands. She wanted to cry, or laugh, but either would take a lot of energy and do no good, so instead she pushed her hair back out of her face.

“What the fuck do we do next? Unless you still want to leave.”

Canderous shook his head, slowly. “I said before you were the most interesting thing that's happened to me in years, and that's still pretty damn true. You want to confront the council?”

She considered this for maybe half a second. “They'd probably tell me I was overreacting and make me drink more tea.” She was pretty sure that whoever she'd been in that other life, she had hated the tea then, too.

A second, worse possibility occurred to her. “Or they would mindwipe me again.”

“About what I was thinking, yeah. You think Bastila knows something. Well, maybe she'll talk more once she's on the ship with us and doesn't have any back up.” Canderous smiled unpleasantly. “Or maybe this mission the Council wants to send you on will give us some clues.”

“Maybe,” she said, staring into the fountain. She didn't want to hurt Bastila – the Jedi had wormed her way deeply into her heart in just a few weeks – but she wouldn't have to, would she? Bastila was spun so tightly, wrapped so deeply in guilt, that she might only have to get her truly alone and demand answers.

She deserved answers.

The noise of the fountain filled up the world, blocked out the quiet murmurs of other Jedi in the garden and the sounds from the training halls inside. For a moment, she was alone with the white foam, except for Canderous's silent presence beside her.

Something surfaced in the back of her head, then. Not a memory, but the bones of one: sitting at a fountain very like this one, maybe even the same fountain, holding a lightsaber in her hands. Words, she'd been saying something, but could she remember...

“Will you follow me?” she said, half-consciously, in the memory and in real life.

“Someone's screwed you over,” Canderous said. “It's an honorless fucking trick, so if you're asking if I'll help you figure out who did it, hell yeah. Even if it does mean fighting for the Republic for a while.”

The sentiments hadn't been expressed the same way, but whoever it had been, the person with her had also said yes. She was sure of it.

“Then I know we'll succeed,” she said, echoing her unknown, other self one more time.

The memory fell away like fog, but she knew there would be more. They would find out what she'd forgotten.

 

 


End file.
